Day of Many Things

Matt here. An appropriate subtitle would also be "aaaaaaaaaaaaah [breath] aaaaaaaaaaaaah" for reasons that will become clear shortly.

Today we had no specific plan, and it ended up being a day of Many Things. We took care of our laundry, wandered around Moab looking at the various stores, took an exteme off-road tour and did some climbing.

I have always thought of Austin as a very outdoors-y town with lots of stores to buy fun stuff. Moab, with a tiny percentage of Austin, puts our stores to shame! The first store we walked into had cool camping, climbing and general outdoors gear we had never even heard of before -- much less seen sitting on a shelf! This store prompted my excited outburst that "I WANT TO MOVE TO MOAB!" For example, some of you know that my house in Austin seems to attract scorpions (that are almost the exact same color as my carpet) and Mike ran across a cool tiny little keychain blacklight that I bought so that I could see the scorpions in my house since scorpions glow in blacklight. While shopping we also ran into one of the cool guides from the white water trip and invited him to join us for climbing that evening.

The extreme off-road tour was a 2 hour guided tour of one of Moab's very difficult (4 out of 5 rating) off-road trails in a real military style Hummer (not the mini-Hummers that they sell now). The guide / driver was very good and had a great time showing off the incredible terrain that the Hummer could conquer. Mike, Annette and I sat in the high-rear seats where Mike is sitting in the picture. As we were going over some of the really steep obstacles, Annette added some sound effects that mostly consisted of screaming, a breath, another scream, and so on. However, she was clearly having a great time and was just screaming for effect after the first few minutes (hence the subtitle) :-) . I discovered that obstacles I would never have thought a vehicle could go over, could be easily conquered with the right vehicle.

After seeing Moab by Hummer, we went climbing again. We (finally) found some routes that were well suited to us. After Mike hiked up to set up a rope, Annette was the first of the group to actually climb to the top (instead of hiking up). Just then, the cool white water guide showed up and started to hike up to set up his own top rope. Unfortunately, there was only time for each of us to climb the wall once as a big storm (with lightening and thunder) rolled in and forced us to leave the climbing wall early. More specifically, the rain started coming down hard just as Mike finished his climb and we all had to gather our gear, run to the car and dive in before we were completely soaked. I was the last one in as the white water guide had to rappel down our rope as it was raining much too hard for him to climb and he would not have had time to set up his rope. On the upside, we got to see our climbing area turned into a series of beautiful waterfalls (unfortunately, none of the pictures came out well)!

We finished the day with a great meal at the Broken Oar (which is only the second good meal we've had in five dinners in Moab).

Tomorrow is Canyoneering!